Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics & the Life of a Water Poet

March 30, 2011

So the earth is cranking past equinox to show it lovely northern face to the sun. Seems like a good time to start cranking this blog up again, too. We'll see how long it lasts...

I'm off to the U of Northern Iowa in a few weeks to talk about ecopoetics and then it's off to ASLE several more weeks after that. It feels good to be in the ecopoetry circles. AWP has felt much more comfortable now that I've found my tribe, for instance.

The first ecopoetry project, "Boomtown," is out to a few publishers and contests. We'll see how that goes. I'm delighted that about a quarter of it so far has been selected for publication (you can see selections up at Terrain.org). And now I have a second project going. Set in and around Lincoln, I'm trying to pull some cultural archetypes together. So I'm into Plains folklore, Native American myth and folklore, and, for a touch of international cultural ecology, Taoist immortals. At the very least, it's a ton of fun.

And speaking of fun (ah, the art of the segue), the games essays continue to develop, morph, and just generally get written.

Yesterday afternoon: a flock of deep-crimson chested robins foraging at the corner of 20th and B. The great horned owl I saw a couple of weeks ago clearly wasn't around.